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Title: To the Deranged
Author: Jean Weir
Date: 2016
Language: en
Topics: insurrection, insurrectionary
Source: Retrieved on 30-3-2021 from https://writerror.com/texts/to-the-deranged
Notes: Written as an introduction to the unpublished magazine, “Deranged 00” and later published as a postscript to Tame Words from a Wild Heart (Jean Weir, Elephant Editions, 2016)

Jean Weir

To the Deranged

These pages are for the deranged, individuals not submerged in habit,

regimented by protocol or banalised by identity, who refuse to be

controlled, ‘facilitated’ or herded into numerically-oriented deadlines.

They want to encounter those who can still raise their voices and howl

with joy in a subdued world where the ironic smirk of the all-knowing

has replaced the wink of complicity and laughter has dissolved into a

kind of hiccough, a punctuation mark to round off the glib remarks of

the eternally detached. They would like to meet those who combine

destructive tension with wisdom, and, armed with creative devilry,

venture into the poisoned jungle of capital to hack it down and let life

surge forth.

The deranged are neither dumbed down by habit nor blinded by the

‘greatest show on earth’. Rather than run around for a cause to support

they are fighting their own cause, egoistically conquering moments of

freedom, subverting and attacking the existent with all means, knowing

that Chaos is life and that Reason continues to generate monsters.

The authoritarian organisations of attack in the not too distant past

were products of Reason, but they didn’t get the chance to put their

ultimate goal of managing power into effect. These structures have seen

their day and old schema have given way to flexible projects of social

control. It is precisely in this terrain that recycled Marxists and

certain anarchists/libertarians are finding common ground, to the point

that you can be an anarchist one day, a post-marxist the next and if the

stomach resists, mutate into an indigestible hybrid. The anarchist

aesthetic is more appealing, but the radical left have so many

fascinating theories… The labyrinthine tomes of these

aspirants-to-power-turned-cohabitants-with-the-existent are more

seductive these days, their workerist verbiage now extinct along with

the proletariat.

Social control is becoming self-control: large numbers released from the

prison/factories and mines of western Europe—thanks to neo-slavery and

digital technology these now function (almost) perfectly on the other

side of the planet—require order from within and the suppression of

individual tensions. This has led to the development of an

‘anti-authoritarian’ practice and a ‘non-hierarchical’ politically

correct language that has been generally accepted regardless of

ideology, which has taken a back seat. The internalised fear of a raised

voice, someone speaking out of turn, the intrusion of an idea or

critique into the smooth machinery of dissenting consensus is turning

thousands of people into bored and boring participants in the same old

designs of the same old minorities concealed behind the wall of resigned

participation that can even embrace aspects of well choreographed street

‘violence’ or neighbourhood initiatives. There has hardly ever been a

conscious decision to experiment some of the insurrectionalist methods

that have appeared in embryon in the struggle in recent decades. These

have rarely been taken up and addressed in deliberate attempts to

provoke rebellion, preferring to subjugate anarchy to alliances with the

leftist forces—that welcome them with open arms, of course—pouring all

their creative/destructive potential into the dead end of patching

things up.

Beyond all that, there is an elsewhere that is almost tangible but

continues to elude us. It is dissipating into thin air, leaving a

dissolute state of ennui tainting rebel visions and dreams. We have done

it all, seen everything before. Stormed the heavens. Entered the prison

gates and come out again, relatively unscathed. ‘The movement is at a

low ebb’. ‘We need new ideas, new methods to transport us into the field

of battle once again.’

In spite of that, attacks on capital and the State by individual and

small groups of anarchists have been practically the only ones

perceptible alongside the huge spontaneous revolts that have shaken the

ground almost everywhere on the planet in the recent past. And this

anarchist attack has not just been addressed at the structures of power

but also against the enemy within, both in the form of citizen/snitches

and a stagnant movement whose only strength is addressed at attempts to

denigrate or recuperate the rebels, the uncontrollables.

However, the anarchist movement as a whole cannot be seen as a

privileged point of reference for the necessary destruction of the

existent. If the (apparently) floundering capitalists were to throw out

buoys to those gasping to stay alive in the deadly seas of economic

megalomania, how many anarchists would be among the first to reach out

to grab one? What better than a bunch of organisationally obsessed

anti-authoritarians to (self) manage the new wild capitalism’s eternal

swindle of ‘fixing things’, now that formal authority is out of fashion

and the politician has moved from inveterate clown to obsolete clone?

That is why the time to attack is now. There is nothing and no one to

wait for. To act now, with determined projectuality where our

destructive tension is the defining factor in our lives, not something

that appears every now and again out of the blue. In the era of ‘use and

discard’, flexibility, snap decisions and about-turns, there is little

desire to think things through, discuss strategies and methods, identify

an intermediate target and act towards the destructive culmination of

the attack.

The production of trivia has led to a trivialised world. Some of what

loosely defines itself the anarchist movement has fused with the urban

subculture, dissipating tensions into a social whirl of benefit gigs and

various forms of anaesthetic from music to ‘soft’ substances to dull the

pain.

For those in the logic of a horizontal attack on the workings of power

(which are complex and always in a desperate battle to maintain

equilibrium and consensus) on the other hand, the objectives are

specific, they do not have ‘revolutionary’ connotations but

insurrectional ones. A few comrades, an analysis of the objective in

question, simple means of communication, a minimal organisational

proposal and above all the decision to see the experiment through to its

destructive climax. An informal insurrectionalist movement is above all

a methodology of self-organised attack, not a fixed organisation. It

does not require numbers in order to exist. A few comrades might enter

relations of affinity and decide to move against a particular objective,

in an insurrectionalist intermediate struggle. But they are not acting

in a vacuum, they wish to stimulate conscious rebellion by the

exploited, not just wait for the next riot to explode. Not desiring to

increase in number as a group, they propose the creation of minimal

self-organised formations that could multiply and widen into a

generalised attack on the existent at any moment, but don’t have to wait

for this before attacking themselves.

An informally organised projectuality of destructive action directed

against class enemies or their structures refuses mediation, delegation

or negotiation. It can have NO COMMON GROUND with political parties,

unions or any other fixed political or armed structures, as these are

antithetical to and enemies of freedom. The concept of alliances or a

common struggle is absurd. Parallel lines never meet. If they do, one or

other has lost its essence. Anarchists who end up making political

alliances in the illusion of numerical strength are traitors: of

themselves and what they say they stand for and of the rebels they had

enchanted with their cries of freedom, to become nothing more than

witless allies of the boss class.

Time is running out.. We must rescue our anger, our bad passions, from

the swamp of tolerance and political correctness, focus our hearts and

minds on the great challenge that is bidding us, break out and encounter

our future comrades and accomplices, the exploited, the angry ones, the

rebels. They are all around us but will remain invisible like ourselves

until we come out into the open with unequivocal words and above all,

actions.

The workings of capital are there to be found if we look for them, far

from the propagandistic fausse pistes and staged ego-trips of trumped up

puppets and showmen. Most of the materials necessary for attack are

available on the shelves of the supermarkets and are simple household

objects waiting to be appropriated. The rest, the ‘hardware’, the

accomplices, the solidarity, will come forth from the reality of the

struggle itself and the new paths it reveals.